An Excellent Book for the Budding Programmer and Those In Need of a Paperweight

This is an excellent book for anyone wishing to learn how to program, but have no prior experience. I found this book while sifting through the computer science section of my college library (Oviatt Library: California State University Northridge), while looking for some books on Neural Networks (I found one book specifically on super advanced game AI (which included neural networks)). It was the first book I've ever seen that focuses on Objective-C, so I decided to pick it up.

Let me start off by making this note; the book assumes you'll be programming in MacOS X with either the Terminal or the Development Tools, but it also shows you how to program using Objective-C in both Windows and Linux.

Unlike other Objective-C/Cocoa books, that assume you know C beforehand, this book assumes you know little to nothing beforehand. As the introduction explains, learning all of C beforehand can be a hindrance (learn things you don't need to learn as they become obsolete when you start working with object-oriented programming), but you must know C to a large extent to ever understand Objective-C (which is obvious). What the book attempts to do, is teach you both C and Objective-C at once, condensing everything you must learn into one.

The book starts off teaching the basics such as variable types, how methods and classes and all the other important things work, and explains important concepts such as data encapsulation. It then delves into more and more advanced things, covering everything from multi-threading to archiving.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to everyone wanting to get into programming, and would even go so far as to suggest reading through it even if you already know how to program in Objective-C, as it does note some obscure parts of the language.

I am currently working through this book, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone with little to no programming experience.

One could also rent the book from safari.oreilly.com for approximately the same amount of money and have access to it for over 100 days. As well as having access to four other titles. (3mo * $11 + 2 week trial ~ 100 days) Just a thought....